Conclusion

Summary

This book has told the story of the Armenian inhabitants of Lebanon in the first decade and a half following its independence in 1943–1946 and in the increasingly bifurcated environment of the Cold War. My analysis has showcased Armenians’ manifold sociopolitical activities and power struggles. The Armenians who have emerged from the pages of the past four chapters are much more than ‘simply’ downtrodden, oppressed, powerless refugees. They time and again used Lebanon and the Cold War tensions playing out in that country to explore and assert their own agency – and thus to reaffirm, and indeed redefine, their own identity not simply as objects but also as subjects of history. This also meant that the Armenians who we have encountered here engaged with Lebanon and the Cold War powers by meddling in them as their very own locales. This has not been a history of loss or simple rebirth, then: two perspectives omnipresent in writings on modern Armenian history. Rather, it has been a history of power. I have focused on how Armenians experienced the everyday in early post-colonial, Cold War Lebanon, making it their own, and how they manipulated and managed loss and renewal. I have pursued this inquiry by closely analysing Armenian language newspapers published in Beirut, examining what they said and how they did so. These often ideologically-opposed newspapers reflected how Armenians in Lebanon re-situated themselves and re-imagined their place in that Middle Eastern country and in the world more broadly during a sensitive, transitional time of change, the early post-colonial period.

With this approach, Armenians Beyond Diaspora contests previous scholarship of Armenians, Lebanon and the Cold War. Historians of Lebanon have largely ignored Armenians in their local and national histories; and if including them, have treated them as a fixed foreign and refugee community, a choice aligned with worn-out, if not cliché, understandings of Lebanon as an abnormal country. They are invested in showing that due to its demographic composition, the Lebanese nation-state barely holds itself together and is always on the brink of violence and warfare. Scholarship on Lebanon's Armenian community has reinforced this picture. It considers Armenians intrinsically and fundamentally as part of other Armenian communities worldwide, united in a desire to return to a homeland and traumatised by violence.